diff --git a/Lib/test/test_re.py b/Lib/test/test_re.py
index b945cf094e9..a506b98be4a 100644
--- a/Lib/test/test_re.py
+++ b/Lib/test/test_re.py
@@ -1402,7 +1402,7 @@ class ReTests(unittest.TestCase):
 
     def test_locale_flag(self):
         import locale
-        _, enc = locale.getlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE)
+        enc = locale.getpreferredencoding(False)
         # Search non-ASCII letter
         for i in range(128, 256):
             try:
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 5f682e5d8fb..b631fde8e52 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -202,6 +202,11 @@ Documentation
 Tests
 -----
 
+- Issue #29571: to match the behaviour of the ``re.LOCALE`` flag,
+  test_re.test_locale_flag now uses ``locale.getpreferredencoding(False)`` to
+  determine the candidate encoding for the test regex (allowing it to correctly
+  skip the test when the default locale encoding is a multi-byte encoding)
+
 - Issue #28950: Disallow -j0 to be combined with -T/-l in regrtest
   command line arguments.